Loudon vs Trawick
Around a month ago Trevor Loudon blogged on Margaret Trawick. Trawick is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Massey University, teaching The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality amongst other papers.
I didn’t see the original post, but did see a later post by Loudon where he responds to an e-mail from Trawick demanding he remove his post, and issue an apology to “all Tamil people, most of all to New Zealand Tamils, to Massey University, and to me.”
Trawick objected to Loudon quoting her comments on a Marxist feminist mailing list, being:
>
> Women and girls do 2/3 of the world’s work for 5% of the income.
> So when women stop everything stops.
>…. and everyone starves. Don’t you think women know that? This is why we cannot go on strike. Be glad we don’t kill every one of you fuckers.
All we need to perpetuate the species is your sperm.
Funny that Marx didn’t think about this.
MT
It seems this is taken out of context according to Trawick. Well the quote is online here, and people can read the context for themselves.
I did exactly that and started reading the other e-mails in the discussion. I then found this e-mail from Professor Trawick:
I cannot bring myself to hate any category of human beings so much that I would want to kill them all – despite what I said last night.
Isn’t this supposed to be a good thing?
Not sure about others, but that to me sounds like you hate men (as a category of human beings), just not quite enough to advocate their extermination.
Anyway, it is not guys’ fault that they are guys.
Not that it matters whether it is their fault or not.
After all, it was not the smallpox virus’s fault that it was the smallpox virus.
So men are like the smallpox virus?
But it got eradicated anyway – nothing personal.
The Holocaust was based on this idea. Better not go there.
Okay – we are clear on that – the Holocaust was a step too far – even a male only Holocaust.
But even lesbians do not as a rule advocate male infanticide – while female infanticide is practiced all over the place. And it is the mothers who do this, of course.
“Right-to-life” advocates say abortion is like the Holocaust. We disagree with them. But in a way they have a point. Selective female feticide happens in China and India. We think it is wrong. Too close to infanticide. But abortion is not wrong – as long as it is not gender selective.
But would selective male infanticide be wrong?
Well I tend to think so. Of course you are not advocating such, just asking the question of course.
And then another e-mail:
If female human beings have been exploited and misused by males since time began, if the most fundamental class division is between female and male human beings, and if females can get along fine without males, except for basic reproductive purposes, then why do not females simply eliminate males, cull them as male calves or goats or sheep are culled by farmers and sold for meat. Because if males are allowed to reach adolescence, they only make trouble from then on out.
They fight and kill one another by nature. Better to cull them before they reach this stage.
Cull is a much nicer word than exterminate.
Please understand that I could not advocate such a program. My only children are two sons, and I love them more than I love anyone or anything else in this world, and after them comes my love for my partner, who is male. I would die for the sake of any one of them if I had to, no
questions asked.
Yep. You personally do not advocate the genocide of males, as you can’t hate “any category of human being” so much. But you are not sure if selective mail infanticide is wrong.
Now these are all e-mails from a publicly archived mailing list. Personally I have little interest in the ramblings of a Massey Professor. But demanding Loudon removes his post and apologises for quoting them is what got my interest in these – as universities are meant to be bastions of free speech.
Please note I will be deleting abusive comments on this post. Make your point without name calling.